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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

Inside the Russian Frame

Civilization, Sovereignty, and Security Trauma

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

1. Introduction: Beyond Western Categories

Western analyses of the war in Ukraine often take place inside a conceptual box of their own making. Political scientists and commentators argue in terms of realism and idealism—two venerable traditions of thought that structure Western international relations. Realists speak of power, balance, and security interests; idealists speak of morality, democracy, and law. Both frameworks presume a shared rational discourse and a common political grammar.

But to understand Russia, and especially the mindset behind its invasion of Ukraine, one must step outside this Western vocabulary. Russia's actions are not only geopolitical but civilizational. They draw on ideas of destiny, trauma, and moral order that go back centuries. The war is not just about borders or alliances but about the meaning of sovereignty and the survival of a distinct cultural world.

This essay takes Jan Krikke's critique seriously: that the Western realist-idealist debate tells us more about the West arguing with itself than about how Russia understands its own behavior.[1] To correct that imbalance, we must enter the Russian frame—a worldview shaped by geography, invasion, spiritual tradition, and cultural mission.

2. The Idea of Eurasia

At the heart of the Russian worldview lies the concept of Eurasianism. Developed in the early 20th century by Russian émigré thinkers such as Prince Nikolai Trubetskoy and Pyotr Savitsky, Eurasianism portrayed Russia as neither fully European nor Asian, but as the center of a distinct Eurasian civilization.

This civilization, they argued, was bound together not by ethnicity but by geography and destiny. The vast steppe, stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific, produced a people accustomed to both conquest and endurance. In the Eurasianist view, Russia's task was to mediate between the spiritual East and the rational West, embodying a synthesis that could save humanity from Western materialism and Eastern despotism alike.

In contemporary times, this idea has been revived by thinkers such as Aleksandr Dugin, who presents Russia as a pole in a multipolar world—a counterweight to the liberal West. For Dugin and his followers, “globalization” is simply a new form of Western imperialism. Against it, Russia must defend the “Eurasian heartland,” where traditional values and spiritual depth survive the moral entropy of modernity.

When Vladimir Putin speaks of a “multipolar world order” and denounces Western “unipolarity,” he echoes this civilizational logic. To Western ears, it sounds like geopolitical rhetoric. To Russian ears, it resonates as historical vocation.

3. Russkiy Mir — The Russian World

Closely tied to Eurasianism is the idea of Russkiy mir, or “the Russian world.” This concept blends cultural, linguistic, and religious identity into a single spiritual geography.

For centuries, the Russian Orthodox Church has regarded Kyiv, the capital of modern Ukraine, as the cradle of Slavic Christianity. The baptism of Prince Vladimir in 988 AD marked the symbolic birth of Russian Orthodoxy. Thus, for many Russians, Ukraine is not just a neighboring state but a spiritual homeland.

The Western narrative frames the invasion as imperial aggression; the Russian narrative presents it as a reunification—a reclaiming of a divided civilization. “We are one people,” Putin declared in his 2021 essay On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians. In this frame, Western influence in Ukraine—through the EU, NATO, or cultural soft power—is not benign modernization but cultural expropriation: the West stealing Russia's spiritual birthright.

This helps explain the emotional intensity behind what outsiders perceive as cold geopolitical moves. NATO expansion feels like a bayonet at the border, but also like a missionary invasion—a challenge to Russia's sense of sacred continuity.

4. Security Trauma: The Deep Memory of Invasion

No discussion of the Russian worldview is complete without acknowledging its deep security trauma.

From the Mongol invasions of the 13th century to Napoleon's 1812 campaign and Hitler's 1941 assault, Russia has endured repeated existential threats from both East and West. Each invasion reached deep into Russian territory, leaving devastation and mass death in its wake. The collective memory of these traumas has formed a national psyche that equates security with survival.

To Western strategists, deterrence is a rational policy; to Russians, it is a visceral instinct. The NATO enlargement of the 1990s and 2000s, while justified by Western leaders as voluntary accession by sovereign states, triggered a powerful sense of historical déjà vu. Russia saw the movement of Western institutions eastward not as freedom spreading but as encirclement returning.

This is why the Kremlin reacts not merely with concern but with paranoia. The memory of encirclement is not abstract—it lives in every family that lost relatives in the Great Patriotic War. It is part of Russia's civil religion.

5. Sovereign Democracy and Moral Order

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia underwent a period of profound disillusionment. The 1990s, hailed in the West as an era of democratization, felt to many Russians like national humiliation. Western economic “shock therapy” impoverished millions, and NATO's bombing of Serbia in 1999—without UN authorization—destroyed what remained of trust in Western intentions.

In response, Russia developed the idea of sovereign democracy, articulated by political strategist Vladislav Surkov. The concept asserts that democracy must reflect national traditions, not imported models. Russia would have elections, parliaments, and media—but all within the bounds of national cohesion and cultural integrity.

This model rests on a broader conviction: that Russia embodies a moral order distinct from that of the West. The Russian Orthodox Church, resurgent since the 2000s, promotes an image of Russia as the defender of traditional family values, spiritual seriousness, and historical continuity—against what it portrays as Western decadence and moral relativism.

For many Russians, then, sovereignty is not just political independence but cultural self-defense. To submit to Western norms of democracy, gender equality, or secularism is to abandon the soul of the nation. This moral dimension underwrites Russia's growing alliance with other “civilizational” powers like China and Iran—each asserting its own moral sovereignty against liberal universalism.

6. The Western Misreading

Western observers tend to interpret Russia's actions through one of two lenses: realist or idealist.

Realists like John Mearsheimer argue that NATO expansion provoked a predictable strategic reaction from Moscow. Idealists argue that Russia's invasion represents a moral regression—a violation of international law and human rights. Both interpretations have truth, but both miss something essential: Russia's sense of itself as a civilization with a sacred mission.

When Western analysts talk about “security interests,” they assume a rational actor pursuing material advantage. But in Russia's own story, the defense of the homeland is inseparable from the defense of truth. Russia's leaders genuinely believe they are resisting a morally corrosive empire that threatens to dissolve all cultures into a single consumerist mass.

This explains why Western appeals to “universal values” fall flat in Moscow. From the Russian point of view, there are no universal values—only particular civilizations, each with its own conception of the good. To claim universality is, in their eyes, to mask domination.

Thus, when Western critics describe Russia as paranoid or delusional, they are missing the metaphysical foundation of Russian policy. For the Kremlin, the world is not a neutral space governed by law; it is a battlefield of moral orders.

7. Toward a Plural Realism

If the Western categories of realism and idealism are insufficient, what is the alternative?

One possibility is what might be called plural realism—an approach that accepts multiple civilizational realities without collapsing them into a single moral or strategic frame. Plural realism recognizes that Russia, China, the West, and the Islamic world each operate from distinct conceptions of justice, truth, and legitimacy.

This does not mean endorsing Russia's invasion or abandoning universal human rights. It means recognizing that the language of universality itself has become part of the conflict. As long as the West speaks in universal terms and Russia replies in civilizational ones, dialogue will be futile.

Plural realism begins with translation: translating one worldview into the conceptual idiom of another. Strategic empathy, in this sense, is not sentimental understanding but disciplined listening—an effort to grasp what the other believes it is defending.

8. Summary Table: Western vs. Russian Frames

To understand the Russian frame is not to justify it. Empathy does not equal sympathy. Yet the failure to understand has real-world costs. Western policymakers, convinced that all nations seek liberal democracy once freed, misread the depth of Russia's resentment and pride. Russian leaders, convinced that all Western outreach masks domination, turned fear into aggression.

The tragedy of the Ukraine war lies partly in this mutual incomprehension. The West fights for law and liberty; Russia fights for memory and meaning. Each side sees the other as blind to reality. Both are, in their own ways, correct.

A more mature international order will require what philosophers once called epistemic humility—the ability to see that our own categories are not universal but provincial. The alternative is permanent conflict disguised as moral clarity.

As the smoke over Ukraine reminds us, civilization itself can become a weapon. But it can also be a mirror, revealing the limits of our understanding. True peace will not come from victory alone, but from a new capacity to see—through the eyes of the other—how the world looks from their sacred ground.

10. Conclusion: Strategic Empathy Revisited

In the first essay of this series, the West's debate over Ukraine was cast in terms of realism and idealism—two logics competing within the same civilizational field. This second essay attempts to step outside that field altogether, into a space where Russia defines itself not by the balance of power but by the balance of souls.

Strategic empathy, in this deeper sense, is not an analytic method but a civilizational dialogue. It demands that we listen to the stories other peoples tell about themselves, not only to the theories we project onto them.

Understanding without endorsement—seeing without surrender—is perhaps the hardest form of realism there is. Yet without it, even the best-intentioned diplomacy remains an echo chamber.

The world, it turns out, is not one system of thought but many. The sooner we learn to think plurally, the sooner we can begin to live together without fear of annihilation.

NOTES

[1] See his comment to: Frank Visser, "Realism and Idealism in the Ukraine War: Can the Narratives Be Reconciled?", www.integralworld.net